FINDING FRIENDS AMONGST ENEMIES

I’ll never forget the feeling of helplessness as I looked at the ad in a major Twin Cities newspaper.

The full-page spread showed a baby raccoon hanging from a No. 4 leg-hold trap that was suspended from a log, leaving the raccoon to dangle. Because I’d been trapping since age 10, I knew several laws had been broken in that picture. Additionally, no trapper worth a darn would have made that set, with that size of a trap, as it made no sense.

Still, I realized that most folks in the Twin Cities had no clue about that picture. In fact, just a couple of weeks earlier, a co-worker at the Saint Paul-based mapping company where I was employed had asked me to look at a “sick cat in the parking lot.” It was a skunk, and I alerted him to that after telling him the animal needed to be “petted back to health.” Sure, I stopped him about halfway to the skunk. However, you can bet that he and most of his neighbors didn’t realize the raccoon ad wasn’t an accurate depiction of trapping, despite its headline: “This is what your fur coats are made of!”